The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,122

they’d hated each other with the particular intensity only schoolgirls could summon. Rin used to grit her teeth every time she heard Venka’s high, petulant voice, used to fantasize about gouging Venka’s eyes out with her fingernails. They would have brawled like wildcats in the school courtyard if they hadn’t been so afraid of expulsion.

None of that mattered anymore. They weren’t stupid little girls anymore. They weren’t students anymore. War had transformed them both into wholly unimaginable creatures, and their relationship had transformed with them. They had never commented on how it had happened. They didn’t need to. Theirs was a bond forged from necessity, hurt, and a shared, intimate understanding of hell.

“Tell me the truth,” Venka murmured. “Where the fuck are we going?”

“Dog Province,” Rin yawned. She was already half-asleep; after a full day of climbing, her limbs felt heavier than lead. “Thought I made that clear.”

“But that’s just a fiction, isn’t it?” Venka pressed. “The Dog Warlord’s army isn’t really there, is it?”

Rin paused, considering.

Telling Venka the truth was risky, yes. It was risky now to share secrets with anyone who didn’t strictly need to know. But Venka was, startlingly, one of the most loyal people she knew. Venka had readily turned her back on her family to follow a group of southerners in revolt against her home province. She’d never once looked back. Venka could be rude and brittle, but she didn’t have a capricious bone in her body. She was blunt and honest, often to the point of cruelty, and she demanded honesty in return.

“I’m not a fucking spy,” Venka said, when Rin’s silence dragged on for too long.

“I know,” Rin said quickly. “It’s just—you’re right.” Her eyes darted around the cave, making sure no one was listening. “I have no clue what’s in Dog Province.”

Venka raised her eyebrows. “Sorry?”

“That’s the truth. I don’t know if they have an army. They could be legion. Enough to push the Republic back. Or they could all have defected, or have died. My intelligence is based on Kitay’s, and his is based on offhand comments Nezha made weeks ago.”

“Then what’s up north?” Venka demanded. “Where are you going? I don’t care what you tell everyone else, Rin, but you have to tell me.” She examined Rin’s face for a moment. “You’re going to wake the third, aren’t you?”

Rin blinked, surprised. “How did you guess?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Venka asked. “You’ve dragged back Master Jiang and the Empress. The Gatekeeper and the Vipress. There’s only one missing, and no one ever confirmed that he’s dead. So where is he? Somewhere in the Baolei range, I’m assuming?”

“The Wudang Mountains,” Rin answered automatically, disconcerted by Venka’s matter-of-fact tone. “We have to get through Dog Province first. But how are—I mean, that’s fine with you? You don’t think that’s insane?”

“I’ve seen stranger things in the past week,” Venka said. “You wield fire like it’s a sword. Jiang—I mean, Master fucking Jiang, the grand idiot of Sinegard, just ripped an entire fleet from the sky. I don’t know what’s insane anymore. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I don’t,” Rin said. “I’ve no idea.”

She was being honest. She didn’t have the faintest clue what the Dragon Emperor could do. Daji and Jiang had been frustratingly cagey on the topic. Daji, when asked, gave only the vaguest descriptions—he’s powerful, he’s legendary, he’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. Meanwhile, half the time Jiang acted as if he’d never heard the name Riga. The only thing Rin had to go on was that both of them seemed so very sure that the Dragon Emperor, once awakened, could flatten the Republic.

“All I know is that he scares Jiang,” she told Venka. “And whatever scares him ought to terrify the world.”

Their misery intensified in the following days, because at last they’d reached an altitude high enough that everything was paved with ice.

Rin was initially undaunted. She’d had some half-baked idea that she might be able to ease their journey with the sheer force of flame. It worked at first. She became a human torch. She melted the slippery roads until they were walkable sludge, boiled water to drink, lit campfires by pointing, and kept the train warm by walking among the ranks.

But after two days of this continuous flame, a numbing exhaustion set in, and she found it harder and harder to reach for a force that drained her and tortured Kitay.

“I’m sorry,” she said every time she found him shaking atop a wagon, ghostly pale, fingers pressed into